Guys with Towels

Something that occurred to me watching The Apprentice...

2009-06-27T22:58:00Z

That's What I'm Talking About

Just For Steve

2009-03-07T10:30:00Z

I just nearly went mad again trying to get Visual Studio syntax colours correct.

Basically, the UI for changing syntax colours in VS is one of my pet hates in the first place, but I found I had some items in my source code that were hideous colours and I could not change them no matter what I did.

It doesn't get any easier than that.

It was happening in aspx files, and the embedded script C# was being coloured stupid ways (inverse video etc). I suspected it was something to do with having installed Ruby In Steel at one point (as the syntax is related), so I uninstalled it.

Still no joy. I had text displayed as white on black, yet I went through EVERY SINGLE item in the VS syntax colour font list, and there was NO entry configured to be white on black. Yet still VS insisted on using that colour combination.

It seemed that VS had some kind of homeopathic memory of the Ruby In Steel syntax colours (or that was my theory).

Eventually I found an answer on the Ruby In Steel website, and the answer is this:

Delete the .suo file

And this worked. Thank Christ for that.

So you just quit VS, find your .sln file, and delete the .suo file that is sitting next to it, and load up the .sln file again.

Syntax colours back to sanity.

By the way, the above exercise took over an hour.

Once again I pondered whether I should write a small app that lets you edit the VS syntax colours in a sane way. For example, you could choose a colour for 'comments', and you wouldn't have to find the 8 different types of comments in the interminable list of token types, and then manually change each of them to be the same colour. (Am I the only person in the world who wants to have comments in the same colour no matter what language I'm using?)

But I'm probably too lazy.

Best. Euphemism. Ever.

2008-12-09T12:50:00Z

So I was in the toilet (restroom if you're a septic) at work the other day, and there was a guy standing at the urinals.

His phone rang, and to my amazement (given his current activity) he answered it.

His side of the conversation went something like this:

"Yeah? Alright? Yeah, er, sorry mate it's not a good time right now - I'm in a meeting with my manager."

In a meeting with my manager. I must remember that one.

Although the contingency is a remote one, I have to say.

Did you know...

2008-09-18T18:30:00Z

...that the Earth has now developed a very slight eccentricity in its orbit?

Sounds Ghastly

2008-09-17T08:24:00Z

Make them stop.

Clever Girl

2008-09-03T11:30:00Z

So Google have announced their new browser, Chrome.

After playing with it a bit, it seems nice, but I think I need my AdBlock Pro and deli.cio.us plug-ins for Firefox too much.

However, you will notice how fast it is! Just scrolling the page seems very fast and slick.

There's a reason for that, and someone's been very clever.

Be vewy quiet, we're hunting psychological manipulations

Basically, for each scroll event (mouse click/wheel/cursor key), Chrome scrolls more of the window at a time than Firefox does. Like, quite a lot more.

Check these images out - they shows successive scroll events in Chrome and Firefox on a web page.

Firefox scrolling - normal scrolling speed/offset

Chrome scrolling - only 2 scroll events and the page title has already disappeared!

I believe most people will notice that scrolling is different, and 'faster', but not be able to work out why. I think I only noticed it because I get riled when people mess with my scrolling (I will never forgive the Logitech mouse driver software that forced smooth scrolling on to me, nor myself for installing it, however briefly). In fact, I sort of don't like Chrome's scrolling, because it's too chunky and imprecise.

But in general I think the reaction will be ZOMG SO FAST!!!111 because to start with, the sort of people who try Chrome will probably be Firefox users. Internet Explorer 7 actually scrolls even more than Chrome does (at least, with IE7), and that feels worse to me. But hey, maybe people prefer it and I'm just weird.

So, job done.

Sneaky.

Why I Love Video On-Demand Services

2008-02-13T16:30:00Z

So I eventually gave up on Channel 4's 4oD service after about a week because the software crashed like 3 times a day (when it wasn't even supposed to be doing anything).

I recently installed the BBC's iPlayer download manager (or is it a delivery manager? They don't seem to be sure which word they're going to use from one piece of UI text to the next). I'd been a happy user of the Flash-based web version of iPlayer, but I thought I'd try out the high quality download thing.

Now, I had configured it to only share programs when the Download Manager was running. That's the options btw - ON or OFF. What do you mean, you want to control the amount of bandwidth? Sod off - do you think it's your internet connection or something?

Anyway, even though it was supposed to be off, sure enough, after about a day of having it installed, I get the same stuff that 4oD used to throw at me:

So that's good.

I'm told they both use the same Kontiki piece of crap system for p2p sharing, which I guess is why they both crash more often than Britney Spears on a school run.

Nice job, guys. The £5m was totally worth it.

Let's interlock brainspaces to form a centre of excellence

2008-01-26T16:50:00Z

Crikey. When did engineers start to talk like Gus from Drop the Dead Donkey?

Check out this post from the Google Maps dev blog:

Speak English, dammit!

I love the way he says 'transitioned' when he means 'moved'.

And don't get me started on 'empowers'.

Jesus H. Corbett

2008-01-12T11:00:00Z

This is the start of a comic series I've been planning called 'The J.C.', for which the concept is teen angst drama (Smallville, The O.C., etc) meets well, you can probably guess soon enough.

I had previously promised myself not to release the start of this series until I had written a certain number of scripts...but I wrote some more scripts recently which I liked, so I feel like I'm going to ignore my own prohibition.

I'm still way off my target, and so I won't release any more until I've hit that target (and learned to draw!), but this first comic has a Christmas theme, so what the hell!

So, let's get on and pitch issue #1 into the world:

With a bit of luck it might make you smile.

NB: the art style will change radically for subsequent issues. In other words, it won't be nearly as good.

Worzel Gummidge Convention

2008-01-11T11:00:00Z

I was watching an episode of The Bill a while back, and one scene gave me a flashback to that old Jon Pertwee TV programme:

"If you cannot afford a hairdresser, one will be provided for you by the court..."

Character Assassination

2008-01-10T21:04:00Z

I'm learning the programming language Ruby at the moment. Well, sort of.

I get the feeling whenever someone designs a new programming language, they have a sort of grudge that certain non-alphanumeric characters are not being used enough, so they push them in their language.

In Ruby, it seems that : and < are the new black.

In Python the emphasis was put on spaces and tabs, in a left-field manoeuvre that no-one saw coming.

Most famously in Perl, of course, they couldn't decide, so they decided to push all the characters they could find, for *%$@#&'s sake.

The Future of Video Rental!

2008-01-10T00:35:00Z

Update: A kindly person from the Xbox team has (indirectly) pointed out that in the XBLA screen, you can choose to view games that you recently downloaded, which addresses one of my complaints below. I think this was a new feature of the last Dashboard update, because I hadn't seen it before. I notice you can also view your 'Recently Played' games, which is also handy. Yay! (At least, I think that one's a new feature...hmm...)

My Xbox 360 has been dropping heavy hints about the fact that I can now rent movies from Xbox Live Marketplace for a few weeks now, so on a whim I decided to try it out.

I was tempted to watch 300, but that's like £2.99 on DVD now, so I went for Zodiac instead. I plumped for the more expensive HD (720p) version just for the hell of it, even though I probably can't tell the difference from my sofa unless I'm wearing my glasses. It comes to about £4.50 I think, for the HD version.

Zodiac!

Anyway, it was 6.9Gb to download, so I set it going and then left the Xbox 360 on the 'Active Downloads' screen, so I could tell when it had finished easily.

Next day, I check the Xbox 360:

Yay! It's finished downloading.

Cool. Let's watch the movie. Now, will it be under Xbox Live Marketplace, or under my media tab..? I am always amazed that the 360 Dashboard doesn't have a 'show me the stuff I downloaded recently' facility. For instance, I have a 120Gb Elite Xbox 360, so I have about 135 games in my Xbox Live Arcade section. Whenever I try a new one, the 360 always makes me go and find it in that list of 135 games. That always makes for a great UX, let me tell you. (Note: see update above)

Oh, well. Let's try the media tab first...

It ought to be in here somewhere

The 'Video store' option just takes me to the place where I bought the video, so let's try the 'Videos' section:

Oh. Not in there then.

This isn't good. Maybe I am supposed to access it via the Video store after all. Let's go there:

Zodiac. Again.

Ok, so there's the movie. It seems to think I have it already, judging from the 'tick' mark next to the movie. Ok, so let's select it and watch the movie!

Huh?

Er, it thinks I want to rent this movie. Surely it knows I've already rented it? Well, ok, maybe it will notice I already have it later, so let's carry on.

No kidding, professsor!

At this point my Xbox 360 decides to get all existential on my ass, informing me that I 'may' have downloaded this movie before. May? May? From the console's total lack of information about my movie download status, I certainly have no idea whether it worked, but surely the freakin' console has some idea if it worked or not?!

Aside: the same thing happens if you try to download something and the download queue is full (*ahem* CString Downloads[6]; *ahem*) - the download fails, but the 360 still thinks you may have downloaded it. Maybe. Possibly. Look, just get off its fucking back, ok? What do you think it is, some kind of goddamn computer?! Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?

I'm sorry, but this really has nothing to do with us

At this point, I try hunting around all the tabs/places I can think of, but I am utterly unable to find the damn movie anywhere.

I decide to call Xbox support for a laugh. The nice lady from the outsourcing office on the Moon tells me to try a few things, culminating in going to the 'System' tab. The System tab? I had honestly never thought of going there to find my downloaded Zodiac movie. So anyway, we go there on a voyage of discovery:

The System tab. For all your movie rental needs.

The Xbot tells me to hit that Memory option, so we go deeper, and see how far the rabbit hole goes:

UI principle #35: Don't make the user choose when there is only one choice.

Er, I guess I'll choose my hard disc unit then. Seems like the most sensible course of action.

Ooh, videos!

I excitedly choose the 'Videos' option:

That doesn't look good.

Now, I'm pretty sure that the icon for the movie 'Zodiac' isn't supposed to be a warning triangle. Let's get some more info:

Incomplete? Incomplete?! Thanks for letting me know!

The nice lady explains that the movie didn't download properly. She is unable to offer me any information as to why this might be, or why the software didn't tell me this, etc. I find I have lost interest in Xbox Live movie rentals, so I ask if the points can be refunded to my account.

This turns out to be a secret time-sink, as I then have to create a customer account with her on the phone (Hello? Don't I already have an account with Xbox Live, ffs?) and faff about waiting on hold while she confirms things, etc.

In all, I'm on the phone for 20 minutes and end up with the promise that the points will be refunded to my account within 72 hours.

It makes going to Blockbuster look convenient.

Hilarious Japes I Never Followed Through On #38

2008-01-09T18:29:00Z

I always thought the custom engraving option for iPods was open to abuse...

I wonder if they are checked by humans before shipping.

Not Poems and Rubbish

2008-01-09T17:23:00Z

I was listening to War of the Worlds by Jeff Wayne today, and it suddenly occurred to me that the Artilleryman is an Open Source Software zealot.

"We're gonna build a whole new world for ourselves."
"It's not been so great living up here, if you want my opinion."
"Take a look around you at the world we've come to know
Does it seem to be much more than a crazy circus show
But maybe from the madness something beautiful will grow
In a brave new world."
"Man is born in freedom but he soon becomes a slave
In cages of convention from the cradle to the grave
The weak fall by the wayside but the strong will be saved."
"In a brave new world
With just a handful of men
We'll start all over again."
"I'm not trying to tell you what to be
Oh no, oh no, not me
But if mankind is to survive
The people left alive
They're gonna have to build this world anew
And it's going to have to start with me and you."
"Imagine the destruction of all that you despise
Slowly from the ashes the phoenix will arise."
"Take a look around you at the world you've loved so well
And bid the ageing empire of man a last farewell
It may not sound like Heaven but at least it isn't Hell."
"I've got a plan!"
"Nothing can stop men like us. I've made a start already.
Come on down here and have a look."

All these years, and I never realised it.

It's doing the working and the thinking that wears a feller out.

Fascist with a Forum Thread

2007-04-23T18:00:00Z

A few months back, I got a new TV, which is 16:9. This means it's different to my 2nd TV, which is 4:3. Therefore I can't use Windows Media Centre on both TVs without a lot of faffing about changing screen modes or moving/maximising windows, etc.

So I solved this problem by writing Switch MCE, which lets you use a button on the MCE remote to flip the MCE window around from one TV to another:

And so my plan to take over the world via a small army of utilities is stepped up a notch.

Ph34r me!

Get Switch MCE here.

(I realise that as I have written a piece of software in the area of DVR/media center applications, the usual tradition is to start an interminable thread on some AV forum somewhere, and gleefully rule that thread with an iron-fist, banning people and subjects who displease me, demanding that you all swear fealty to me and/or fall on your swords at my command, threatening to take my ball away and play somewhere else, and so on, like some sort of tin-pot frustrated little Hitler, in return for the vague promise that I might possibly make some of my software open source at some as yet unspecified time in the future, and eke out this sad little fiefdom for 2 to 3 years to bolster my own ego, but to be honest, I just can't be arsed, so I've put this on my website instead. Deal.)

To the HP employee who packed and posted my replacement laptop keyboard...

2007-04-20T22:30:00Z

To the HP employee who packed and posted my replacement laptop keyboard...

You did it wrong.

That is all.

Stay With Me On This One

2007-04-20T22:00:00Z

I wouldn't normally comment on this because it is such a tragedy for those involved, but the recent furore about the shootings at Virginia Tech has once again brought Jack Thompson out of the woodwork. His contention is that the blame for events like this lies fairly and squarely on the shoulders of video games like Counter-Strike.

Here's an example of his inexorable logic about the Virginia Tech shootings:

"He might have killed somebody but he wouldn't have
killed 32 if he hadn't rehearsed it and trained himself
like a warrior on virtual reality. It can't be done.
It just doesn't happen."

Presumably, Jack's version of "it just doesn't happen", doesn't include someone like Michael Ryan going on a shooting spree in Hungerford and killing sixteen people and wounding fifteen others.

No, before games like Counter-Strike, something like that would never happen. Oh, wait, except it did happen, and it happened twenty years ago in 1987.

I don't know if you're familiar with the state of video games in 1987, but they looked something like this:

Good luck planning your high street slaughter with that Virtual Reality.

As for how someone like Cho Seung-Hui managed to kill 32 people on his first attempt...well, here's the big secret, and see if you can follow me all the way to the end on this one, Jack:

He had some guns.
Additionally, they were loaded with ammunition.
He went into a college and shot at students in large numbers.

So I trust you see how that works. No big mystery there as to how it was done, merely why.

I'm reminded of when police officers said that the Columbine shooters' hit ratio was amazing, and much, much higher than the hit ratio of the average police officer who has been formally trained in firearms use.

I'm also guessing that those same police officers don't routinely go into schools full of children and gun them down, which may explain why their hit rate is lower.

Why do people's brains seem to leave their heads the moment something like this happens?

If you're interested in my opinion as to why Cho Seung-Hui did this, having seen extracts of his video and diatribe, I'd say he did it for the usual reasons. Which is to say, he was self-obsessed, selfish, and, in my lay opinion, batshit insane.

(One of the reasons for my commenting on this is that I know if I had lost someone in an event like this, and I saw a self-publicising, self-aggrandising jerk like Thompson splashing himself all over the news blaming video games for everything, I think there's a good chance it would make me feel even worse.)

Spoiler Alert

2006-07-28T09:00:00Z

Don't read this entry if you've not seen the film 'Fight Club' yet, as it contains spoilers.

Ok, so the first rule of telling people about films they should watch, is you do not give away the ending.

The second rule of telling people about films they should watch is you do not give away the ending.

By way of background, I used to subscribe to FilmFour (a tv channel showing just films, run by Channel 4). Due to being disorganised (and being pre-Tivo), I rarely got around to watching any films on the channel. However, they showed 'The Shining', and as I'd never seen it, I thought it would be a good time to watch it - FilmFour shows films in widescreen with no ads. Perfect.

There was even a short 5 minute introduction before the film, presented by Mark Kermode, the self-important film critic ("Is there another kind?"). Great, I thought, that will be good - have some of the more interesting aspects of the film pointed out, so I can look out for them when watching.

The intro was only 5 minutes long, as I said, but even so, Kermode managed to tell me the ending of the film.

That's right, in the intro before the film was to be screened, he told me the ending of the film.

Tosser.

What a goddamn muppet. Since then, I've never given credence to or even paid much attention to anything Kermode says. My reasoning for the latter is that he seems to be actively trying to reduce my enjoyment of any film I might watch, which is not something I need, to be honest.

So I turned off the TV in disgust, and to this day, I've never seen 'The Shining'. There didn't seem much point watching it at the time as:

I knew the ending.
I was angry at Mark Kermode and FilmFour for being so mind-numbingly stupid.
Mark Kermode is a tosser.

Look at him. Tosser.

You could possibly make the argument that anyone who watches films on FilmFour, or watches a short introductory piece about the film are all tedious film-school dropouts/wannabes who've already watched the film, and they just want relive the experience. So it doesn't matter if you tell them the ending of the film.

Personally, I believe this excludes what I presume is the majority of people who watch a film channel, who are people who just want to watch a film without having some pompous dickhead pop up before the film's even started and shout the ending of the film at them.

So, now, fast forward to today, when FilmFour have once again excelled themselves.

FilmFour has just been added to the FreeView line-up, so on Channel 4 this weekend they showed a programme called "50 Films To See Before You Die". I recorded this as I thought it might be interesting, and I was idly flicking through it this morning (the joys of DVR). One of the films they recommended was 'Fight Club' (and already you know where this is going).

So, over some film footage of Fight Club, they had a caption that said something like "Fight Club contains one of the most effective plot twists in movie history." That made me slightly nervous, as I always find if you tell someone to watch a film with the exhortation "It's got a really good plot twist" then they spend the whole film trying to work out what the twist is. Sometimes this is no bad thing - I watched 'The Sixth Sense' like that, but still really enjoyed it, and didn't work out what the twist was until it was essentially happening.

However, I also watched the Kevin Costner film 'No Way Out' with the same knowledge (it had a twist), and I deduced what the plot twist was within about 2 seconds of the relevant plot event happening. I then spent the rest of the film waiting for the twist to happen.

100% pure 80s Cheese

So anyway, FilmFour/Channel 4 managed to be quite restrained.

Except they then wheeled on some talking head who proceeded to give away the entire ending of Fight Club.

I mean, for God's sake, what is the point? You're making a program that is called, for Cliff's sake, "50 Films To See Before You Die" - it's not called "50 Films You Should Really Watch Again". I immediately stopped watching - I've already seen Fight Club, so it wasn't a bother to me. But I expect they gave away the endings of 'The Sixth Sense' too, and probably of some films I haven't actually seen yet.

As I said, I don't really need that.

If someone had come up to you years ago and said "You should really watch 'The Empire Strikes Back' - it turns out, Darth Vader is Luke's father!" I don't think you would have been impressed. You may have boxed their ears. Yet for intellectual film critics, this seems to be a perfectly acceptable way of behaving.

My Mum had a similar experience with 'The Usual Suspects'. It was being shown on terrestrial TV for the first time on BBC2 (I think), and they advertised this on Radio 4, and even had a short piece about it on one of the programmes my Mum listens to. During which they gave away the ending of the film. If you've seen 'The Usual Suspects', you'll know that does kind of ruin the film for the first viewing.

The greatest trick Mark Kermode could play would
be to convince the world he doesn't exist.

Jesus. How hard is it not to do that? Read that again - the BBC made a big point out of how it was being shown on terrestrial TV for the first time. So for many people, this would be the first chance they had to watch the film. So what the BBC thought they'd do, obviously, is spoil the film for as many of those people as they could.

Even on the internet, where rudeness and lack of consideration for others knows no bounds, there is an informal agreement that you should put the words "SPOILER ALERT!" before any revelation that might spoil a piece of art for someone else.

Yet, for some reason, broadcasting organisations that manage to tell you to "Look away now if you don't want to see the football results", can't seem to do the same when they give away the ending of a film.

I'm not really sure why they do it - my guess is that if they can't talk about the clever ending of a film, then they can't demonstrate to you just how very clever and insightful they are.

Of course, by repeatedly spoiling films for me, they're doing precisely that.

In the words of Ms. Morrissette, how ironic.

Colour me surprised

2006-07-13T21:00:00Z

So, MSN Messenger Live 8 Beta Turbo FX+ FINISH HIM!!! is sort of out now, and it looks all shiny and Vista-esque:

Don't cut yourself on those corners

It's instructive to note that MSN Messenger 8 allows you to:

Change your window background
Do animated nudges
Send animated emoticons
Play huge 'winks' and other monstrosities
Set up a display picture
Tell people what music you're listening to
Keep your contacts in the address book
Send SMS messages to someone's mobile phone
Use voice chat to another PC or telephone
Video chat
etc

...but if you want to change your font colour so it's easy to tell your own comments from your friends' comments, then you still get the fantastic choice of the 16-colour EGA palette from 1988 - suck it down!

See anything you like, sir?

It goes without saying that half of these are almost unreadable on a white background (or just plain unbearable), and the others are varying shades of muddy puddle, ffs. About the best colour they have is blue, for god's sake - blue is the worst colour to use for text (your eye is worst at resolving detail of blue objects), but it's still one of the best text colours available in MSN Messenger. I think that says a lot.

Plus, it has come to my attention that some people voluntarily eat snails. This is unrelated information, but of a similar level of rank stupidity.

Sigh.

Like I Care!

2006-06-24T08:45:00Z

There's this really annoying tendency some people have, and it really bugs me sometimes, and makes me want to shout in their faces. And not in a good way.

It goes like this: someone is trying to sell me something (or make money out of me, even in an indirect way) but finds out that, on reflection, I have decided not to take them up on their allegedly fabulous offer. My usual way of dealing with sales people is to ignore their pitch as much as possible, and mostly to disbelieve anything they say that is not a matter of public record, or cannot be confirmed by a panel of independent experts.

Ignoring their pitch includes shunning their insistence on talking to me whenever they can, phoning me up all the goddamn time etc. I have a mobile phone, but - and this is something that some people really don't get - it's for my benefit, not theirs. So if they know I have a mobile phone, they phone it all the goddamn time, and can't understand why I don't drop everything and answer it whenever they call. My mobile phone is not a red-painted bat-phone that cannot be ignored.

The Nokia BAT-1

That's not the really annoying part.

The really annoying part is when I've denied them the chance to do their pitch at me, and then rejected their offer, and they say how disappointed they are, and how they wish they'd "had the chance to talk to me about it properly", and how the phone is the only way they can effectively communicate with me, and that they are "finding it really frustrating not being able to contact me."

By this time, I will usually have suggested (many times) email or leaving a message as an effective and non-intrusive way to impart information to me, but they don't like this.

I presume it's because they imagine they are such a fantastically good salesperson that if they could only talk to me, they could work their inter-personal magic on me and I will change my mind in no time. But they can't. So they get upset and tell me they are 'sad' or 'disappointed' about this. And basically, that I'm not giving them a fair chance, or wasted their time, or I've let them down, or possibly that, in a funny way, I've let customers down everywhere.

So, in light of that, allow me to let every such person know the following information, which, although it's not in the form of a telephone conversation, nevertheless includes all the information they need to know:

I. Really. Don't. Care.

Thanks for listening.

Pot Roasts and Windows Media Center

2006-04-24T14:00:00Z

There's this story (or parable, if you will), which illustrates the importance of doing something for reasons that you know and understand, rather than out of blind acceptance of the philosophy of "But we've always done it that way."

The Pot Roast Story, as it is commonly known, tells the story of a young wife who cooks her husband a pot roast for dinner. He asks her why she cut both ends off the meat before cooking it, and she replies that her mother always did it. Her curiosity is piqued, however, and so the next time she speaks to her mother, she asks her why she did this. Her mother replied that it was because that's what her mother (i.e. the wife's grandmother) always used to do. Accordingly, the mother then asks the grandmother why she did this, and the grandmother replied that they didn't have a pot big enough to roast the joint in, so she used to cut off both ends to make it fit. Here endeth the story.

I was reminded of this the other day when trying to record something on my Media Center PC. If you were around for reel-to-reel tape decks (which I wasn't really but my parents had an old one), or cassette recorders, or even just VHS decks, then you're probably familiar with buttons like this:

Handsome.

Now, the uninitiated might try to press that record button, but they wouldn't have much luck. That's because with a tape based system, when you start recording you destroy whatever is on the tape at that point. So the designers made it hard to press the record button by accident. As all right-thinking people know, to record, you will need to press the Record and Play buttons together, otherwise it won't work. This goes right back to reel to reel tape decks, such as this specimen, which seems to have (I'm guessing) two record buttons that you have to press together:

They don't make them like that any more.

Most VHS decks use a similar two-buttons-at-once system to guard against accidentally recording over something you want. Or you can remove the plastic tab from the tape - remember those? And the desperate hunting for a bit of sticky label when you realised you didn't want to keep the tape contents any more, but it was the only tape you had to hand, and you really wanted to record something that was on TV right now?

But I digress.

Later, VHS remote controls often used to hide the record under a slidey panel, or recess the record button so it was harder to press by accident, like this:

Try pressing that by accident.

Of course, with today's new technology of hard drive recorders, where you're not stuck with a fixed size media that can only hold recordings of a few programs at once, we don't have any need of such UI design, so the remotes for these products don't do this sort of thing.

Er, except...that remote - here's a bit more of it:

How quaint.

It's the official remote control for Windows XP Media Center Edition. For some reason, they think record is such a destructive operation that they should protect the user from it. Despite the fact that:

Most of the time, the button has no effect (because people with DVRs usually don't watch live TV).
You have gigabytes of disc space for recordings, so the only way it can be destructive is if your hard drive is full, and the recording on the bottom of the list falls off due to the new recording.
With one of these devices, you're running the risk of losing recordings off the bottom of your list all the time, because it will be scheduled to record lots of things, and not just when you're watching TV and press the record button.

On the other hand, it does make the record button hard to press, which combined with the sluggish response of MCE when you ask it to record (there's no instant feedback until it's done whatever processing it decides to do), can make you think you haven't pressed it properly.

So, for example, I pressed record on something that I wanted to watch (a rare occurrence for me - watching Live TV), and then decided to record the whole series (which you do by pressing Record a second time). The record symbol stayed as a single red circle next to the programme, so I thought I hadn't pressed it, and pressed it again. After a few seconds, the '3 circle' logo appeared (meaning that the whole series will be recorded), so I went back to something else I was doing. Unknown to me, as soon as I turned away, a second later the third press was detected, which means "cancel recording". So when I went back to the TV 15 minutes later, I found that the program wasn't recording after all.

Genius.

I await the day when a child asks its parent "Why is the record button all flat and hard to press?", and the parent replies, "I have no idea."

It may remind you of this, if you live in the UK:

This sign means "Warning: Speed Camera"

I often wonder what most children make of that sign these days, given they quite possibly have never seen a camera that looks anything like that. I don't think I have, come to that, except in pictures.

When UI Costs Lives

2006-04-23T23:50:00Z

So I was watching the film Collateral Damage this evening. I'm not proud. It wasn't great, but wasn't as bad as I'd expected from the reviews. Anyway.

In case you don't know, it's an Arnie film where Arnie plays a goshdarned fire-fighter whose wife and child are killed in a terrorist bombing. Various unlikely hi-jinks occur, including a trip to Colombia via Panama, a rescue mission, return to the US, etc., along with various characters such as the weaselly CIA guy, the bordering-on-decent FBI guy, and crazed terrorist, Johnny Foreigner.

So far, so Voytilla. But there's a bit at the end (spoiler alert) where the crazed terrorist has placed a truck full of explosives under a government building in Washington, primed to detonate when he calls a certain phone number. Arnie corners the bad guy under the building, and after a bit of rough and tumble fisticuffs, the terrorist comes out on top, and starts dialling the bomb number on his mobile phone.

Things aren't looking good for our hero

Luckily, Arnie has a fire axe to hand (well, he is a fireman) and dispatches the terrorist with this, along with one of his one-liners. Well, it's actually a one-worder. Then Arnie picks up the mobile phone, and looks at the display:

DR BMB: TYM 2 XPLD. L8R, KRZ TRST

Arnie casually cancels the call, and flips the phone shut. Disaster averted.

But then I got to thinking. What if it had been a Motorola phone? It might have been a very different ending.

"Ha ha, terrorist, you lose! Cancel. No, cancel. Cancel! Aieeeeee!"

Curse you Motorolaaaaaaaaa!

Worth thinking about.

Endless tinkering

2006-01-28T15:40:00Z

I have added a 'compact' view to my FreeSpace utility, and also enhanced the volume list to show the relevant icon for each volume...

The new hotness

...when really, I should be at work.

640Mb ought to be enough for anyone

2006-01-27T02:25:00Z

I have written another little utility, called Decent FreeSpace.

What it does is (you'll never guess) monitor the free space left on your hard drives and network shares, and lets you know when you're running out of space.

Handy, eh?

That's pretty much it. It's a bit rough and ready, but you might find it useful.

Get it here.

Get RSSy in my Forums

2006-01-23T21:10:00Z

The RSS feed re-fit continues apace, and you should now see the RSS feed icons in the top right of my site.

You'll always see feed links for the blog/articles and all forum postings, but in forums and threads you will now also see contextual RSS feeds based on the page you are looking at, as shown in the image to the right.

This allows you to monitor posts to a particular forum or thread, rather than just all forums, which may be handy for you.

For example, you might ask me a question on the forums, and want to know if/when I reply - now you can just add the 'This Thread' feed to your RSS reader (assuming, of course, that you don't already subscribe to the 'all forums' feed anyway).

Magic, eh?

NB. At the moment I've left the 'default' feed (i.e. the one that Firefox shows you in the bottom right of the window) to always be the blog/articles feed, but I might change this if I can be bothered.

Ph34r my syndication 5killz!!!11

2006-01-22T02:00:00Z

Well, I just had a bit of a play around, and I now have a working RSS feed for this site. If you use Firefox, or anything else that recognises RSS feeds automatically, you should see a little orange RSS feed in the bottom right of your browser window.

Failing that, the feed itself is here. I'll be having a go at adding feeds for my forums soon.

It's almost too exciting.

It's Time to Play the Music (Muppet Show Part 1)

2006-01-19T22:00:00Z

I'd like to point out that I'm not negative all the time. It's just that this entry might make it seem like it.

I'm writing this now, while I'm still pissed off about it, and anyway, it's what you're supposed to do in a blog, isn't it? Moan, I mean. As m'colleague Shim would say, "People and/or things suck! Yay! Write a blog entry!" Or something like that. I can't do the accent.

So. Anyway.

There's a famous book in the field of software development, called Peopleware. It's probably not as famous as it should be, and it applies not just to software development/engineering, but to any endeavour where you're trying to get people to produce creative and high quality work, particularly what the authors term 'intellectual work'.

One of the facts that Lister and DeMarco (the authors) present in this book is that the variation in productivity between software developers can vary by as much as a factor of 10.

Those numbers can be a little confusing at first, so let's talk it out.

In other words, if you take one of the best programmers and one of the worst, and give them the same task, the best guy* will finish ten times faster than the worst guy. So if the best guy finishes the task in a day, the worst guy will finish in in 10 days, or 2 freaking weeks as you and I would call it.

And don't go thinking smugly to yourself "Ah, yes, but the guy who finishes in a day will have produced rushed and shoddy work." because apparently that's not true either. The fastest guy's work will usually also be superior to the slowest guy's work. Read the book if you want more details on this.

Some people (myself included) often have a problem believing this statistic, even though the authors provide substantial proof from their own experiments and observations in the workplace.

Well, I don't have that problem any more, because I recently worked with yet another muppet who drove home the truth of Lister and DeMarco's claims.

Quite simply, he sucks.

One of the opinions I have formed in my programming career is that one of the most important characteristics of a programmer is honesty. Programming is complicated enough without some ignorant fool trying to bullshit you that they know what they are talking about. If I ask a programmer on my team a question, and they don't know the answer, I expect the first thing they say to be "I don't know." I don't expect some load of regurgitated rubbish that they hope will make them look smart or salvage their ego.

Not a terribly good role model for programmers.

The problem with the Muppet (as I shall henceforth refer to him) was that he had the following characteristics:

He thought he was an expert in his field.
He so was not an expert in his field.
He was fiercely proud (of what, I am not sure).
He would never accept that he was wrong about anything.
He had a deeply-ingrained simplistic view on just about every technical subject.
He was rubbish.

You're probably thinking that this is a deadly combination, and you'd be right.

The Arena of Pain

The scenario under which I had to experience this super-star's talents was fairly simple - the implementation of a vertical web application. He was the implementer, and I was managing the project, i.e. him (and supposedly other projects, but in the end it took all my time to manage him, and to do the development work to pick up his shortfall in productivity).

The application was not that complicated. It involved processing orders, dispatching and maintaining stock levels, and so on. So not exactly rocket science.

Not actually that complicated.

The system used to implement the application was Zope. After having learned a fair amount about Zope on this project (I'd never used/encountered it before), I'll be frank and admit that I'm not its number 1 fan.

This was exacerbated by the fact that there are essentially two main ways of using Zope:

The old, stupid way: mixing the markup and logic/code in Zope's DTML files - a bit like classic ASP programming (as I understand it).
The new, recommended hotness: separating markup and logic, and using a language like Python to implement the logic in a clean way.

You'll never guess what the muppet's preferred method was.

CNSQNS

Of course, Einstein chose the old, stupid way. This was not from mere ignorance of the new, second way of doing things. Oh no. He had heard about the separation of presentation and logic, but wanted no truck with it. The old way was 'much better'. He kept referring to it as 'pure Zope'. I was pretty sure it was pure something, but that wasn't it.

Cards on the Table

Now, as the muppet had never worked with me before, and I was his manager, I guessed that he would assume I was some know-nothing PHB who wouldn't be able to help him materially in any way. Early indications confirmed this. When he found out that I had never used Zope, I could see in his eyes that he was mentally writing me off as a useless idiot. Which was ironic, really.

Anything You Can Do

The muppet said that even if I learned Zope, I wouldn't be able to help him with the development work for about a month. The fact that after 3 days I was writing DTML code that linked to complex SQL queries and generated sales reports web pages seemed to be an annoyance to him. In fact, he told me it was a waste of time, because the database schema wasn't finished yet, so I would have to 'rewrite it all' when he finalised the schema for storing orders. I tried to explain that I'd just have to adjust the SQL query to get the data from the relevant table/field, and possibly do some minor adjustments to data ordering, etc, but he wasn't having it.

I believed that the work I had done on the UI and generation of the report presentation was actually useful work, that would require minimal updates when the Muppet actually got his act together and decided what the database schema would be. Stunningly, this turned out to be true. In fact, the Muppet used to almost gleefully tell me in status meetings that he had changed the database schema again, and that I would have to 'rewrite' all my report code. In each case it rarely took me more than about 10 minutes to tweak the SQL query to cope with his changes.

In short, he didn't seem to have a clue about designing to cope with change. This became evident as whenever he had to change his schema, he seemed to have to rewrite a lot of his code. We'd hit a minor problem that needed a slight change to the database, and he'd say it would take 3 days to update his code. Initially I argued with this, but eventually I just sighed, because he actually did seem to be telling the truth - he really was that incompetent.

The Expert Speaks

Just to give you a little flavour of the muppet's expertise and quality of work - for a start, his code had no comments. I think I'm right in saying none, rather than 'not many'. This was just one of the many ways that his work spoke to me.

Another favourite was in his implementation of product orders. An order line consisted basically of a product code, and a quantity. The price also needed to be stored in the order line (so that if the price of a product changed, it wasn't retroactively applied to all previous orders referencing that product).

Imagine my joy when I examined the orders database table, and found the following named fields:

price1
price2
price3
price4
price5
price6

In case you're wondering, all the fields were used.

"That is not the preferred nomenclature."

The various fields were sundry nightmarish combinations of price x qty, price inc. VAT, price ex. VAT, and so on.

I can only thank God that he didn't name them as follows:

priceeachexvat
priceeachincvat
totalpriceexvat
totalpriceincvat
eachvat
totalvat

...otherwise, someone else (or, in fact, the original programmer) might have stood a chance of working out what the hell these fields were used for without first poring over the source code for two days.

Later, I renamed as many of these fields as I felt safe doing - but usually that meant using the 'as' operator in the SQL queries. I would have changed the field names in the schema itself, but they were used all over the place, and Zope's facility for search/replace is unbelievably laughable for DTML, and I didn't have the time to waste finding out if it would be worth it.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that I ditched the last two price fields - I managed to find a way of synthesising them when I needed those values from the other fields. See if you SQL gurus can work out how I managed that super-human feat of programming! Yes, that was sarcasm.

It's the Rebels, Sir. And they've got a flag.

Another stroke of genius was that almost every database table had a field called 'flag1'. Now, see if you can guess what this means.

I can wait.

Give up?

Well, 'flag1' was a boolean flag that marked a record as being active, or deleted, whichever way you look at it. Now, you might think that a field name like 'active' or 'deleted' might be more appropriate (and would indeed give you a clue as to the interpretation of literal flag values of 0 or 1), but you'd be a fool and a communist to think that.

To put your mind at ease, there were no instances of a 'flag2' field (or similarly named fields) anywhere in the schema.

Revision control? We don't need no steenkin' revision control!

A recurring theme of working with the muppet was that he would excitedly show me something that was part of the 'beauty of Zope', as he called it, and I would think "Isn't this just a poor implementation of <insert 20 year old programming technique>?"

"I haven't got time for this Mickey Mouse bullshit!"

Case in point: the marvellous Zope Undo feature!

Now, and brace yourself when I tell you this, because it's pretty damn exciting, but whenever you make an edit to a Zope script and store it in the database, then (I can hardly contain my awe), the Zope database keeps the old copy of the script!

Not only that. Not only that! You can go in and choose to 'undo' your changes to a script!

Veteran coders are at this point sitting on the floor, breathing hard, and wondering what hit them.

Anyway, it's possible that I spoiled the moment when I replied, after being shown this awesome feature, "So it's a form of revision control?"

And how right I was - it's a form of revision control. But sadly not a useful one.

You can't see diffs between two versions, or explore the history in a useful way, or look at change comments, etc. I know, I know - if he didn't even comment his code, why would he provide meta-documentation about it? I can dream, can't I?

And if you undo a change, then a 'redo' record (or some similar aberration) appears in the history, and after that I never could work out how to go backwards/forwards reliably in the history. Zope would usually tell me that some undo record or other could not be applied because some other undo record had not been applied yet. Or unapplied. Or re-applied. Or something. I found myself longing for Visual Sourcesafe.

I feel unusual

Right, that's enough vitriol for now. If you'll excuse me, I don't feel quite so. I'll continue documenting the madness in a future entry, including the exciting neologism 'Retrospec'!

I can hardly wait.

(Footnote: When I say 'guy', I am using it in a friendly, non-gender specific way. If it helps, you can imagine that when I say 'guy', I'm actually saying 'humanoid work-unit of unspecified gender'.)

"I have in my hand a few simple leaves..."

2005-11-05T22:00:00Z

Today I was walking down the street on my way to the Tesco emporium, when I passed a couple of young mothers, each equipped with buggy and child.
It being Autumn, the leaves are falling off the trees in that smugly predictable way that is their wont. Each of the children in question had a yellow-orange Maple leaf of their very own in their hand, and were waving them like mad, beaming with delight. One of the children actually had two - she had one leaf in each hand, frenetically waving them both at the world in general. It looked like she was about to pass out through sheer excitement.

You remember what a leaf looks like.

It seemed a stark contrast to our society of relentless pursuit of money, property, and just, well, things in general, really, where we are conditioned to feel that life is one big competition, and that, as one bumper sticker puts it, "The one who dies with the most toys, wins."
That the possession and waving of leaves could be so enjoyable and fulfilling to these small people gave me pause for thought.
I tried to imagine the view out of those children's eyes, how simple the world must be, and where waving a leaf could cause paroxysms of joy. I wondered if perhaps they saw coloured spots before their eyes, so great was the intoxication induced by manual leaf oscillation.

Calm down, dear.

I suspect it will be only a short time before leaves hold no interest to those children, as their worlds become filled with designer labels, Nike trainers, celebrity, small green pieces of paper, rent, income tax forms, jobs and mortgages.
But I dare say that there will be more children coming along, ready to discover the joy of leaves.
And the best part? Apparently, they actually do grow on trees.

You'll get 16:9 eyes, you know

2005-09-20T23:30:00Z

Recently I decided to build a 'media PC' for myself. This means a PC that you plug into your TV, and use as a PVR, a DVD player, and to watch video files or listen to music. Or do anything else you can set it up to do.
You can use a few different bits of software to run a media PC, but I chose Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE), mainly because MS provide free TV listings, and MCE supports dual tuners, too.
So, if you want to know how to put a media PC together, and what to look out for, then I have written up what I did for your viewing pleasure.
I even took some photos.
So, to start with, I'm assuming you're going to use XP MCE as the software, but a lot of this article is relevant even if you don't.

Windows XP Media Center Edition

Here are the Headlines

The rest of this page goes into details, but here's a headline list of things you should think about/be aware of when building a media PC:

The PC needs to keep cool

Modern PC components (especially powerful CPUs and graphics cards) can run hot. This means one thing: they must be cooled, which means fan noise (unless you're insane).
So a media PC with the latest and greatest CPU and graphics card will be louder than a more sedate PC. Loud fan noise can be very annoying.
Graphics card

ATI or nVidia? There are a few factors to think about here, but a less obvious one you ought to know about is that currently nVidia do a better job of offloading MPEG decoding work to their graphics hardware (which means the CPU has less work to do, so stays cooler, and so you (usually) get less fan noise - see cooling section above). See also next section on TV output though.
If you're going to use a monitor rather than a TV, you might be able to get away with your motherboard's onboard video hardware. For instance, my motherboard had Intel integrated graphics, and it seemed to run Media Center just fine (but only had VGA output so I couldn't use it for everyday use).
TV Output

You need a graphics card (or motherboard) with TV output - either S-Video or Component is recommended. You may be disappointed if you try to use composite video (single phono/RCA connector) to drive your TV.
Also, many newer ATi cards support connection of the VGA output to a TV that takes RGB input, as they provide the correct sync output to do this - it requires a special cable (VGA to SCART, or whatever), but it does work. On the other hand, nVidia cards don't currently support this, so if you want RGB from an nVidia card, you'll need a TV with either component input or DVI input, which are less common.
S/PDIF Output

If you have an AV amp, or any sort of speaker/entertainment system that accepts digital input, then try to get a motherboard/sound card that can output the sound via an S/PDIF connector. It just makes everything so easy. You connect one cable from the PC to the Amp, configure MCE to use S/PDIF, and that's it. Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is automatically sent to the amp from DVDs, Stereo PCM is sent from TV/music etc. No messing about with 4 or 5 jack plugs which probably give naff sound anyway. All sound is pure digital all the way to your amp. Just make sure you get the connector that matches your amp, because S/PDIF can be either electrical or optical.
DVD drive

It's hard to go wrong with a DVD drive in these days of dual layer DVD+/-R/W burners for Â£30, but the main thing to watch for is noise. It's no good building a nice little quiet media PC if whenever you sit down to watch a DVD your drive sounds like a 747 taking off. Various websites will tell you about quiet DVD drives.
You need to buy an MPEG2 software decoder

You can't watch DVDs or recorded TV without an MPEG2 decoder, and XP MCE does not come with one. Luckily, various companies sell them at a reasonable price. Personally I use the nVidia decoder as it is by all accounts very reliable (I've certainly never had a single problem), and it also takes full advantage of the PureVideo MPEG decoding hardware on my nVidia graphics card.
Size matters

You're probably trying to build a fairly small PC - so make sure it will all actually fit in the box!
Will the CPU fit in the case without blocking off anything else or being blocked itself? Will the fan/heatsink fit in the case? How much cabling will you have? Is there room for the cables to fit, and the drives, and still have sufficient airflow in the case to allow the PC to avoid overheating? Give this at least some thought before you run off buying all the biggest/coolest/hottest components you can find.

So, er, anyway...how did I get on?
The First Mistake

So, I thought I'd try out MCE, as MS have started selling the OS as an OEM package. What this means is that you can buy the MCE OS for about Â£80 from a computer retailer, as long as you buy one or more other 'bits' of a PC at the same time, e.g. a new hard drive, etc.
Before this, you could only buy a PC with MCE installed from an official MCE reseller such as HP. They would build the PC and set up MCE, and sell you it as a complete package.

These PCs sold reasonably well, but part of the success of the PC is due to the open nature of the platform, which is why I guess Microsoft decided to start selling the OS as an OEM version.
I had an old PC, which I thought I'd try out MCE on - it was an 800MHz Pentium III with a GeForce 2 MX graphics card. I figured this would be enough to get it running, as any TV recording I would do would be via DVB-T cards, which just dump the pre-encoded MPEG stream to disk, so the CPU requirements would be fairly minimal. The PC was also more than capable of playing DVDs, too.
So I bought XP MCE and the MCE remote control for Â£100, and tried to install it on my old PC.

Well, that didn't work

It installed ok, but when running the Media Center (which is a separate full-screen application that runs on top of XP), I was told that my graphics hardware or drivers were not compatible. From looking around on the internet, it seemed that MCE requires more than 32Mb of video RAM to run, and will just abort if your system isn't up to it. My GeForce card had 32Mb of RAM, so I was out of luck.
From searching on the internet, I found a way to circumvent the check for >32Mb, so it would accept a video card that had 32Mb. It was a bit of a hack, but it got the Media Center app to run. However, when I tried to watch videos or a DVD it would just crash with a black screen.
Even if the hardware didn't work, you'd think they'd manage to make MCE not just crash the whole OS/GUI, but that's probably outside the remit of this article.
So I searched a bit more, and found out about 'approved' graphics cards for MCE. This is when I learned the most important thing there is to learn about MCE.
How to survive XP MCE

Rule #1 - just use approved or compatible hardware.
That was the closest I've ever come to using the tag. Seriously.
If you don't have the right graphics card, go and get one.
The amount of grief you'll have using untested hardware configurations is probably really not worth it. Especially as one of the main features that you want in a PVR is reliability. You don't want your graphics drivers to periodically cause random BSODs when the PC is, for instance, recording the Season Finale of 'Lost'.
Microsoft keep a list of graphics cards/chipsets that meet the requirements of XP MCE - however, they keep it reasonably well hidden - have a look at it here. (Once again, I couldn't find that page by navigating Microsoft's site; I had to use Google to find it - good job, Microsoft!)
Realistically, your choices for graphics cards are ATi and nVidia. The Microsoft list is slightly out of date, so you can check the approved cards on for both ATi and nVidia on their websites.
If you want to use MCE as a PVR (and you very probably do), then this rule goes double for TV decoder/tuner cards. For the love of God, check that the TV card you buy is supported by MCE, and is generally reliable. This hardware/software is going to be running 24/7, so you don't want flaky drivers or codecs.
For reliability, just check out other people's experiences on relevant web forums. In particular, if you're going for dual tuner support (so you can record two programmes at once, or record one programme while watching another), then check that the dual configuration for your hardware is supported by MCE (again, forums are best for this).
Sadly for me, if I wanted to use an approved graphics card, they were all AGPx4 or PCI-Express, and my motherboard only supported AGPx2. So I would need a new motherboard. Which means a new CPU. And new RAM. So I decided I'd just build a new PC.
Living with a Media PC

So, you probably want to put this PC in your living room, so you probably want it to be unobtrusive. This means it needs to be small and quiet.
Smaller than a rat

In terms of being small, you can get 'microATX' motherboards (also known as mATX) - these are a maximum of 24cm by 24cm in size, so you can fit them in quite a small case. More microATX cases are coming on to the market these days - basically, you can go for a cube-ish shaped one, or a flat one, shaped rather like a VCR or hi-fi component.
Finding a small PC case is a voyage of discovery all of its own, so I won't bore you with the details except that I eventually decided to get an Antec Aria case:

There's a helpful review of this case at silentpcreview.com.
You might also want to look at the Antec Overture case.
Cases like these let you choose which motherboard to put in the case - you can also get 'barebones' PCs that include the motherboard (and sometimes other components). Because the configuration is known, this allows manufacturers to make the cases tailored to the motherboards (which are themselves often custom built). The most well-known exponent of this style of small PC is Shuttle. Most of their PCs are smaller than the Antec Aria case, for example:

...and some have nice things like front panel displays built in:

However, be prepared to pay for them. Personally, I was able to justify spending about Â£500 on a media PC. Getting a Shuttle SFF PC and spending Â£800 or more on it seemed to be pushing it.
Another advantage of systems like this is that they know where the cables will go, so they can do customised cable management. For example, the IDE/power cables on Shuttle PCs are sometimes only a couple of inches long:

Then again, SFF PCs such as this are often more limited in terms of being upgraded, so some upgrades are difficult (and usually replacing the motherboard is out of the question). As ever, it comes down to a compromise in the end.
Cooling is the new hotness

As I mentioned earlier, you should pay attention to keeping the PC components cool. There are two main reasons for this:

If the combination of the case and components cannot be kept cool, your components will overheat and fail. This can be expensive - or just irritating if it causes unreliability but not outright failure.

Keeping things cool usually means fans, which usually means noise, which is usually annoying when you're trying to watch TV.

As a general rule, the bigger the fan, the quieter it is. This is a slightly counter-intuitive result, but it just comes down to the fact that a bigger fan doesn't have to turn as fast as a smaller fan to move the same amount of air.
The fans you usually have to worry about (in terms of noise) are CPU fans, and the fans on graphics cards. The CPU fans are often small (50mm) compared to larger case fans (up to 120mm), and often change speed depending on the load on the CPU (and hence how much heat it is generating). So when they're turning at higher speeds, as they are small, they can make a lot of noise.
That CPU - who does he compute he is?

As it happens, the CPU fan in my Media PC (an LGA775 Celeron) is really pretty quiet - whereas the CPU fan in my desktop (an S478 Pentium 4) is annoyingly loud.
If your CPU fan is loud, there are all sorts of 'aftermarket cooling solutions' as they are known. What this means is that you can buy replacement heatsinks and fans to fit to most x86 CPUs, which are in some way or another more efficient than the standard heatsinks the CPU manufacturers provide/sell.
There are usually two reasons for getting one of these cooling systems:

Your CPU is overheating with the normal fan (e.g. your case cooling system is poor, or the case is too small, or you have too many components generating too much heat, or you are overclocking the CPU, etc.) so you want to cool the CPU more efficiently.

Your CPU temperature is ok, but you want more efficient cooling, so you can reduce (or in some cases eliminate) fan noise altogether.

For instance, you can buy pretty heatsinks like this:

The Zalman CNPS6500B-ALCU

An optional extra with this is to mount a large fan (120mm ideally) above it, so it will dissipate the heat, but using a fan that rotates slower and hence generates less noise (because it's bigger - see above). This Zalman heatsink comes with a handy bracket for mounting such a fan.
Or you can get 3rd party heatsinks with integrated fans like this:

The Zalman CNPS7000B-ALCU

In all cases, be sure to check the cooling system dimensions, and any space required around it that must be free of components on the motherboard. For example, that heatsink/fan above might look nice and pretty, but bear in mind that the fan in that picture is 120mm in diameter!
Also, some of these heatsinks are so heavy (especially the 100% Copper ones, rather than the Copper/Aluminium mix ones) that you can't actually move your PC with them attached, as it will damage the CPU or socket/motherboard. All of this is worth bearing in mind.
Me, I'd say keep it as vanilla as possible. In my media PC, I have the standard heatsink/fan combo that Intel provide with the LGA775 Celeron, and it is quiet and works fine. (On the other hand, I am considering a Zalman heatsink for my desktop PC, as the CPU fan can get so noisy).
Graphics Card Fans

The main problem with fans on graphics cards is that the designers all seem to have gone to the same engineering school - the one where the lecturers left out the part that said don't put slats around the fan otherwise you'll turn it into an air-raid siren.
Graphics card manufacturers are getting wise to the fact that people don't really like noisy graphics cards, so you'll see lots of strange and interesting designs, involving heatsinks on both sides of the PCBs, or in some cases bizarre heatpipe arrangements. If you don't need the latest top of the range graphics card though (which you don't, unless you're playing Half-Life 2 on your Media PC, or similar), then you can go for a reasonably powerful modern card (i.e. actually 'low end') and just get one with a heatsink. I got one of the cheapest nVidia PCI Express cards around, based on the GeForce 6200 chipset:

Leadtek PX6200-TC/TDH

As you can see, I went down the fanless heatsink graphic card route. I can recommend it. The card does dual output, and has VGA and DVI connectors on board, with S-Video, Composite and Component output connections(!) via a short breakout lead. It's also very quiet :-).
NB This card only has 32Mb of VRAM, and uses your system RAM to bump it up to 128Mb as necessary, using the magic of PCI Express and the associated fast memory bus - an arrangement which nVidia call Turbo Cache (ATi have a similar scheme on their low-end cards called HyperMemory). This probably means that if you're building a Media PC with one of these cards, you should probably install more than 512Mb of system RAM. I have 1Gb of system RAM in my Media PC, and it seems to work fine.
Motherboards

Choosing a motherboard for me was both complex and easy. Complex, because there are so many motherboards out there, but easy because I wanted:

Micro ATX

FireWire

S/PDIF audio output

Those 3 requirements narrowed my choice down to 4 motherboards - 2 of which were Intel. In the end I went for an Intel 'media' board, the D945GTPLR. This can take both Celeron and Pentium 4 CPUs (in an LGA775 socket), has a 7.1 audio chipset with optical S/PDIF out, onboard video (which seems more than capable of running XP MCE), 10/100 LAN, 3 Firewire ports, and more USB2 ports than you know what to do with (eight, I believe).

Handsome

No Gigabit LAN onboard, but you can't have everything, it would seem.
The S/PDIF is very nice though - just connect the S/PDIF to your amp/decoder, and that's it. Assuming your amp/decoder is smart and can auto-detect 5.1/DTS/PCM Stereo etc. Also, make sure you get the right kind of digital output for your amp - mine can take either kind, but you might find your amp accepts optical (TOS) connectors only, like this:

S/PDIF TOS (optical)

This is a fibre-optic cable, so of course be careful with your minimum bend radius, as ever.
Alternatively, you might have a co-ax (electrical) cable for digital audio, like this:

S/PDIF Co-axial

As I said, I was lucky enough to have a choice (my amp has 3 optical inputs and 1 electrical), but some amps only do one or the other, so check first, unless you want to end up buying a Co-ax to TOS converter box for $40 or whatever.
Miscellaneous Hardware Stuff

Hard Drives - SATA or ATA/IDE?

You're probably not going to see a huge amount of benefit from using SATA drives in your Media PC instead of ATA drives, except for a couple of advantages that I totally missed until it was too late:

SATA data cables are much thinner and easier to route in your case.

If your motherboard only has one IDE controller (mine does), your hard drive will not have to share the IDE controller with the DVD (optical) drive (which can slow the hard drive down, depending on your hardware configuration/capabilities).

Just thought I'd point it out.
Hardware has Version Numbers too

Be careful when buying components - I managed to look at a whole stack of motherboards, and saw that they all used DDR RAM, so I ordered a couple of sticks of DDR RAM, as I knew I'd need it. Then I ordered my nice Intel motherboard. Of course, the motherboard took DDR2 RAM - there's a version 2! Luckily it's the same physical size as DDR RAM - but the connector is different. Watch out for that. Fortunately I knew someone who wanted to buy some DDR RAM, so in the end my mistake only cost me a tenner.
Perhaps more importantly, you should know that not only is there an 'ATX12' PSU standard now (an ATX supply with a 12v rail for the ever hungrier CPUs on the market today), but there is an 'ATX12v2' standard too! This standard includes a second 12v power rail for PCI Express cards (i.e. for monster high-end graphics cards that need to draw 75W - some even have an extra power connector that plugs straight onto the card!).
When my Intel motherboard arrived and I plugged in the PSU connector, I was confused, as it didn't look like the keyed connector would fit. It did fit straight on...but then I realised it was two pins too short - this was when I first became aware of the fact that there was a 'Version 2' of the ATX12 PSU standard. Grrr! In fact, my motherboard supports Version 2.1!
At this point, I was super annoyed, because the PSU was a custom fit for the Antec Aria case, and if I couldn't use the PSU, I couldn't use the case. Damn and blast them all!
Anyway, much googling revealed that I might not need a v2 PSU after all - the main difference seemed to be the extra 12v rail for power hungry PCI-Express devices - it was at this point that I was grateful I had chosen a low end graphics card. It seemed to make sense that if you didn't have the requirement of the 2nd 12v line to drive your PCI-Express graphics card, then you might be able to get away with it - especially as the ATX12 connector was keyed, but still fit onto the ATX12v2 connector on my motherboard - if they were incompatible, surely they would have changed the keying so you couldn't even plug it in? Well...probably...hmm.
So I fired off two emails - one to Intel to get the lowdown on their motherboard/CPU's PSU requirements, and another to Leadtek to ask them what the power consumption of the graphics card was.
The response I expected was exactly the opposite of what I got. Some muppet at Leadtek replied saying they recommend a 450W PSU - thus neatly avoiding the question I actually asked, of course.
But with Intel, after a day or two of silence, I assumed they were ignoring me. However, then I got an extremely helpful reply, summarising what the situation was, and saying, yes I could just use the ATX12 PSU if my PCI-Express card did not draw too much power, and I wouldn't blow up my PC if I turned it on - that was the news I wanted to hear!
So I will say: pay close attention to what you buy - especially any innocuous looking version numbers you might find in the specs. As it turned out, I got off lightly, but it could have been an expensive mistake.
I will also just say here: Intel's email support is great. They actually answer you in the end, and they seem to have people who know what they're talking about, or who are able to talk to engineers that do. I emailed them back with some feedback about the drivers on the CD that came with the motherboard, and they thanked me for the info and said they would try to put it in a revised product note on their website, and asked if there was anything else they could help me with. Top marks to Intel email support.
(By contrast, Intel phone support were useless and couldn't wait to get me off the phone at the earliest excuse - but try their email support - it's really good.)
Putting It All Together

Not much to say here, except I was super lucky that everything actually fit into the Antec Aria case.
While I was still waiting for the motherboard to arrive (which took ages, as it was newly released), I first became concerned about the size of the Intel heatsink/fan, and whether it would actually fit under the PSU in the case. Various worried googling revealed that it would probably fit...just. Maybe.
I was not wrong:

Width of a Human Hair to Spare!

Top tip for Aria case: just remove the PSU before you start - trust me, it will make it so much less hard to get the motherboard in. Notice that I didn't say easy. You can take the PSU right off - just remember the connector details for the 3-pin mains socket on the back - if you disconnect these pins (fairly easy - they're just standard blade/socket connectors) then you can just take the PSU right out. It is up to you to make sure you connect the PSU up again correctly! If you fry yourself, it's your own damn fault - don't blame me.
It looks a bit dodgy with the CPU fan being that close to the PSU, but the vast majority of the CPU fan is unobstructed by the PSU, and so far I have had no problems with CPU temperature:

Nothing to worry about, Mr Grimsdale!

It might look like there's lots of room in there, but once I put the drive bay in, it gets a bit cramped, and routing some of the cables (USB and Firewire to front panel, as well as the USB card reader) got a bit fraught until I worked out a neat way of arranging the cables:

You should have seen it before I got it tidy.

By the way, that black curved thing nearest the camera is the extra cyclone blower that comes with the Aria case. It sits in an expansion slot and sucks air in and blows it out the back of the PC. Even though my PC didn't seem that hot, I installed it anyway, as I would be having two PCI cards (TV tuners) and one PCI-Express card all sat right next to each other. Fortunately the TV tuner cards don't need much power, so they're not a major source of heat. Even the graphics card is only fairly warm to the touch, rather than too hot to keep your fingers on. Chalk up another point for not buying the most powerful graphics card available.
It's a bit of a tight fit getting the drive bay in, but I found round IDE cables helped enormously here - and I found I really needed a long one (75cm) due to the way the drive bay swings in/out, and the arrangement of master/slave connectors on an Ultra-ATA cable. It's a slight hassle, but I much prefer it to having a short cable I have to disconnect every time I want to open up the PC. With the long round cable, for instance, I can easily do this:

The PC is all still connected and will boot in this state.

You may notice that I used a simple Y-connector for the molex power supply connectors for the hard drive and DVD drive - this gave me the extra length required to be able to lift the drive bay out without having to unplug the molex power connectors. If you've ever had to unplug one of those bastards, you'll know why this feature was top of my list. If I ever meet the guy who invented those connectors, one of us will die.
So anyway, with all that, it's a tight fit when the drive bay is installed. I was a bit worried about airflow problems due to the cabling, but it seems to be fine, and the Intel motherboard has two temperature probes which both say the temperature inside the case is fine.

Just one wafer thin mint?

So, it's all jammed together now, so I plug it in, hold my breath, turn it on, and bung in the XP MCE install CD...and look! Windows is installing on my TV!

"Is it just ITV you can't get?"

So, once I'd installed MCE and played with it a bit, I decided to go for dual TV Tuners, just to go mad, so I ordered a second Black Gold DVB PCI card.
NB If you want dual tuners, you need to get the same hardware for both tuners, otherwise MCE will have problems. I believe it's possible to use two different DVB-T tuners if they both receive exactly the same services/channels, but I wouldn't risk it myself. Keep your life simple - you know it makes sense.
So, I had one TV tuner, and I had one spare PCI slot burning a hole in my pocket:

Begging for it.

Inserting the second tuner card was pretty simple - I was a bit concerned that the back of the tuner card would be jammed right up against the graphics card heatsink, but due to the fact that the PCI card sits centrally in the socket (duh) it turned out to be fine:

Don't know what I was worried about.

Just to make life exciting, of course, the audio header connector for the motherboard is under one of the PCI slots, and the PAL tuner housing of one of the tuner cards snagged the cables. However, in a repeat showing in the 'I'm so lucky it all fits in' category, I found that if I carefully bent the wires coming out of the header, the tuner card would fit over the header and everything still worked great:

Just how jammy am I?

So after all that, it's done, and it must be time for a nice cup of tea. Or at least some form of pleasing beverage.

I knew I'd find a use for this camera eventually.

Miscellaneous Software Stuff

MPEG2 - Hello John, got a new codec?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a newly installed MCE Media PC must be in want of an MPEG2 codec."

Although XP MCE is designed to play DVDs, and recorded TV shows, both of which are in MPEG2 format, it doesn't actually come with an MPEG2 codec. Read that again in case you missed it. I'll wait.
The idea is that the (in our case mythical) OEM will choose an MPEG2 codec for you and install it on the PC when they set it up. There are a number of MPEG2 codecs you can buy - WinDVD, PowerDVD and nVidia offer MCE approved MPEG2 codecs, amongst others.
There's that word again - approved. Make sure before you buy a codec that it is designed to work with XP MCE. You can download a program from Microsoft's website to check what MPEG2 decoders you have installed, which are MCE compatible, and which is the 'preferred' codec that MCE will use. If you have problems with MPEG2 playback (DVDs or recorded TV shows), then this is the first port of call. I won't even bother to link to the download page, as MS will have moved it by tomorrow - just google for Microsoft and DecCheck and MPEG, and you should find it.
It basically tells you about your system config, regarding MPEG2 codecs - for instance, here's what my desktop PC reports:

All Present and Correct

The 'MCE Compatible' and 'Preferred Decoder' are the important columns.
E4 - Huge Disabled Channels In Your Dinky Little Registry

If you live in the UK, and are using Freeview DVB-T, then you might find that E4 mysteriously doesn't show up in your channel list, even though you know you can receive it. This is because E4 used to be non-free, so MCE blacklists it from showing up in the channels/services - because MCE currently has no way of using CAM slots/cards, etc., to receive and decode non-free (encrypted) channels. (Yes, that means no Top-Up TV for you with MCE, I'm afraid.)
However, this is out of date because as you probably know, E4 is now free for all to watch on Freeview in the UK. To enable E4 requires a bit of jiggery-pokery, and is explained here on the Microsoft website. Enjoy.
So...how well does XP MCE work then?

Well, that's a subject for another (hopefully much shorter) article. In summary: it works mostly ok, but with a couple of really annoying bugs :-(

Random Rampant Computer Imagery in my Home!

2005-09-20T23:00:00Z
I like watching CSI (in all its forms), but now and then it's just a bit dumb. They sometimes like to create tension by having the management leaning on the lab manager about budgets, etc. I'd have to say, given some of the utterly profligate ways in which they throw money at often inconsequential cases, I'm quite often on the side of the suits on this one.
A favourite criticism of CSI is that the timescales are often ludicrous - cases are almost always solved in a matter of days, if it even takes that long. That's one of the things I like about Law & Order - if you pay attention to the dates that flash up at the bottom of the screen during an episode, you realise that sometimes the events are happening over a period of months. It's a nice way of acknowledging that people doing such work don't usually get to leap nimbly from case to case, solving each as they go. There's a certain amount of hard slog.
Anyway, the particular bit of idiocy that prompted me to write this is one of the old '3D Computer Graphics Re-enactments' that they seem so enamoured of. Here's how it works: some guy with nothing better to do painstakingly captures and enters the 3D measurements of the crime-scene (or maybe just a related location) and the objects it contains into a 3D package, and then produces some bullshit animation to go with it.
In the real world, of course, by the time he'd finished, the murderer would be in Cuba, but in the magical world of CSI, this byzantine process usually reveals a vital piece of information that Detective Horatio Crane would otherwise have had to obtain by some other hugely expensive and complex method, like getting out a ruler and spending 30 seconds measuring a chair or something.
Case in point: this episode revolves around a Speed Dating event. The room has a number of tables with two chairs. The women stay at the same seat, and the men shift seats every 5 minutes. The victim seems to have been bothered by something he saw behind one of the women he was speaking to. So, do they look at the floor plan and work out who was sitting behind her at the time?
No. Of course they don't. They come up with this instead:

It wuz the Lawnmower Man wot done it, Guv!

I mean, it's the first thing you'd do, isn't it? It's supposed to show that the line of sight of the victim (yellow guy) would allow him to see the man at the table behind (green guy). And no, I'm not sure how the CSI:3DS guy was able to capture everyone's posture that accurately. Maybe the guy running the Speed Dating event had a load of spare ping-pong balls and decided to make it a combined Speed Dating and Motion Capture evening. You tell me. Judging from this picture, discovering that the victim was also a freaking Cylon was presumably just a bonus.
As usual, the CSI:GEEK also had some totally made-up animation of everyone walking around the room from table to table over the course of the evening. Christ knows how long he spent on this, when really, to quote Harry Hill, he should have been at work.
But as I say, luckily this day or so of work meant that instead of getting out a floor plan and thinking for about 45 seconds, the team could get on with what really matters, such as Horatio standing around in sunglasses and not looking at the person he's talking to, or Calleigh standing around talking in a Southern accent and looking hot*.
By the way, thank my new Media PC for making it really easy for me to grab that TV image above. The PrtScn key is your friend.

*For the avoidance of doubt, Emily Procter is a fine actress. She's good in CSI:Miami, but watch The West Wing to really see her shine.

Guys with Towels

Something that occurred to me watching The Apprentice...

That's What I'm Talking About

Just For Steve

It doesn't get any easier than that.

Delete the .suo file

Best. Euphemism. Ever.

"Yeah? Alright? Yeah, er, sorry mate it's not a good time right now - I'm in a meeting with my manager."

Did you know...

Sounds Ghastly

Clever Girl

Be vewy quiet, we're hunting psychological manipulations

Firefox scrolling - normal scrolling speed/offset

Chrome scrolling - only 2 scroll events and the page title has already disappeared!

Why I Love Video On-Demand Services

So that's good.

Let's interlock brainspaces to form a centre of excellence

Speak English, dammit!

Jesus H. Corbett

Worzel Gummidge Convention

"If you cannot afford a hairdresser, one will be provided for you by the court..."

Character Assassination

The Future of Video Rental!

Zodiac!

Yay! It's finished downloading.

It ought to be in here somewhere

Oh. Not in there then.

Zodiac. Again.

Huh?

No kidding, professsor!

I'm sorry, but this really has nothing to do with us

The System tab. For all your movie rental needs.

UI principle #35: Don't make the user choose when there is only one choice.

Ooh, videos!

That doesn't look good.

Incomplete? Incomplete?! Thanks for letting me know!

Hilarious Japes I Never Followed Through On #38

Not Poems and Rubbish

Fascist with a Forum Thread

To the HP employee who packed and posted my replacement laptop keyboard...

You did it wrong.

Stay With Me On This One

Good luck planning your high street slaughter with that Virtual Reality.

Spoiler Alert

Tosser.

Look at him. Tosser.

100% pure 80s Cheese

The greatest trick Mark Kermode could play wouldbe to convince the world he doesn't exist.

Colour me surprised

Don't cut yourself on those corners

See anything you like, sir?

Like I Care!

The Nokia BAT-1

Pot Roasts and Windows Media Center

Handsome.

They don't make them like that any more.

Try pressing that by accident.

How quaint.

This sign means "Warning: Speed Camera"

When UI Costs Lives

Things aren't looking good for our hero

DR BMB: TYM 2 XPLD. L8R, KRZ TRST

Curse you Motorolaaaaaaaaa!

Endless tinkering

The new hotness

640Mb ought to be enough for anyone

Handy, eh?

Get RSSy in my Forums

Ph34r my syndication 5killz!!!11

It's Time to Play the Music (Muppet Show Part 1)

Not a terribly good role model for programmers.

The Arena of Pain

Not actually that complicated.

CNSQNS

Cards on the Table

Anything You Can Do

The Expert Speaks

"That is not the preferred nomenclature."

It's the Rebels, Sir. And they've got a flag.

Revision control? We don't need no steenkin' revision control!

The greatest trick Mark Kermode could play would
be to convince the world he doesn't exist.